Is your cafe location an asset or a liability?

Running a café in Singapore or any part of
the world for that matter, people will naturally choose the best location. The
question is, how do you define the best location?

Many of you will reply that it should have high
traffic volume. Here, I am going to give you two scenarios that might make you
rethink this notion.

First, Singapore’s Orchard Road is known as
a shopping paradise. Crowds throng the streets and even on weekdays, you get a
pretty high volume of traffic. Rental is crazily high, with some malls going at
S$50 per square feet or even more.

So if you are in this shopping mall with a prime
location, is that good news?

Secondly, Marina Square which underwent an
approx. $95million revamp is touted as one of the hottest shopping mall due to
its proximity to Marina Bay Sands. Again, rental is high there because of the
expected increased traffic the makeover is supposed to bring.

But earlier this year, Marina Square was
plagued with rodent woes (rats was found in the soup of a restaurant). People started
avoiding the shopping mall and many shops there including F&B outlets had to
close their businesses.

In this case, it is bad news to be running
a café in that shopping mall.

I am citing the above two cases, for people
familiar with Singapore shopping scene. Malls such as Bedok Point, Century
Square, 112 Katong etc will make one rethink the concept of choosing your store
location based on high traffic flow only.

In the above two scenarios, location is
more of a liability than an asset. My point is, if your café or F&B outlet
is highly dependent on location for business, the business risk is very high.

Instead of investing a huge chunk of your
operating dollars in location, you should be investing more in marketing instead
to make your café a destination by itself.

This highlights that it is possible to
mitigate any situation, even with such a dire reputation. Marketing your café as a destination itself
and having the right positioning are most essential.

About the Author:

Ebenezer Heng runs a community
that reaches out to 0.5 million people daily (Oncoffeemakers.com’s digital
assets). Lectures in a Singapore Tertiary Institution and advises digital
marketing for organisations such as Chinese Chamber of Commerce, National
Sports Association, Constituencies.

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